Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822

This two-volume set presents and contextualizes selected manuscripts in the New York Public Library’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle.

These final volumes of Shelley and His Circle conclude its record of the poet, his contemporaries, and his times. Representing 198 manuscripts from 1821 to 1822, they shed light on Shelley’s unfulfilled literary and personal aspirations in the months that led up to his drowning. They also tell how Byron’s connection to Countess Guiccioli’s politically imperiled family dictated his movements in Italy, leading to his reunion with Shelley and the formation of the short-lived Pisan Circle. Pieces of Leigh Hunt’s correspondence are presented in full for the first time, as are previously unpublished letters of Edward Trelawny, along with his eyewitness account of the cremation of Shelley’s remains. New translations of Italian correspondence and fresh transcriptions of published material also appear, as do literary manuscripts of both Shelley and Byron. A selection of annotated manuscripts from the period immediately following Shelley’s death offers a record of the anxieties and dashed hopes of his survivors, as the search for the lost poet and his close friend Edward Williams, who drowned alongside him, was conducted and concluded. The volumes close with an unpublished letter by the widowed Mary Shelley, as she prepared for her reluctant return to England.